Springtime. That’s what this is supposed to be right now. Yes, my Red Sox are out there choking as the season begins and, yes, my Leafs are out there choking as the season winds down. So the calendar looks like it’s on the right page for sure. But… where is that first sweater and shorts day I have been looking forward to? When will I be able to rake the lawn. Raking the lawn is an important old guy task. It leads to people leaving you alone, unsure why the lawn needs raking. You tell them “breaks up the thatch!” but they don’t know that’s just code. Code for there’s a couple of beer tucked away in the shed. Ah… the shed. See you soon!
Meanwhile, in Pellicle last Friday, David Bailey‘s* cartoon featured the various postures seen at the pub bar. Is it ageist to say the one that struck me as most accurate was the one to the right? As a newly minted retired guy I can say these sorts of things. Isn’t that how it works? Like raking the lawn. Because you need to break up that thatch, right?
Next up, Katie wrote about one of my favourite cities due as much to the depot for bus route 128 to the villages of the fam as anything. But, Ms. M. does know a good spot when she sees one and this week we read about her thoughts at the sight of Kay’s Bar:
Once a wine and spirits shop in a nefarious part of town where the streets ran toxic with sewage and the tenements were cramped and filthy, Kay’s Bar is now uncommonly beautiful. Like most cobbled and higgledy-piggledy neighbourhoods in the UK, Jamaica Street has a “dirty past” as local pub writer Imran Rahman-Jones puts it, but now it feels pleasantly historic, and the low stone buildings around us are picturesque. When our group comes upon the pub in the early hours of dusk, the side doorway glowing golden in the darkening blue.
As the son of a son of MacKenzie Street by Cappielow in Greenock, I recognize the lineage.
Beer writers talk lots about being judges but not a lot about being amongst the judged, the position which carries a lot more weight to my mind. But this week Alistair wrote about entering and receiving the results of three beers he entered into competition:
There is a large amount of irony, given what I just said about crystal malt, in the fact that this used 5 types of crystal malt, 15, 40, 60, 120, and 260, as well as dose of chocolate wheat. Hence I named this Crystal Conjunction. It’s kind if hilarious then that one judge commented that the “absence of balancing caramels and light roast/chocolate impact the overall character”. Literally all the specialty malts were crystal or chocolate malts. Obviously mild is not something that is wildly common, heck it might as well as an endangered species over here, but I have come across a concept many times in the US that a mild is basically an uber session stout – which is simply not true, the range of possibility within mild makes it a beer you can take in so many directions, as borne out by the BJCP guidelines themselves.
And Jeff was on the otherside of the glass, having judged at the Oregon Beer Awards with this interesting comments on process:
In judging these beers, you do take style into account, along with the brewery’s submitted notes on the beer. If you have a beer that just lists a style, you judge it both as an example of that style and how well it competes against the other beers at the table. If the brewery has added a note, you include that in your calculation. A beer might be dinged for being a poor example of its style but elevated for being just an awesome beer or vice versa. If the brewery says it has hibiscus or rye malt or is “American-style,” we would expect it to taste like rye, hibiscus, or elevated hops. You take all of that into account.
Speaking of the limits of the aphorism “judge not lest ye be judged” we are advised that this is not an April Fool’s Day spoof:
Tilray Brands is partnering with the Magnum Ice Cream Company to launch Popsicle Hard, a ready-to-drink cocktail inspired by the frozen treat brand’s classic flavors. The noncarbonated beverages are beginning to roll out nationwide in 12-can variety packs. Popsicle Hard has a 5% alcohol-by-volume rate and is available in cherry, orange and grape flavors. Tilray is producing the drinks through a licensing agreement with Magnum Ice Cream, which was spun out from Unilever at the end of last year.
Ah, fads… or was that a spoof! Perhaps with about 97.38% more integrity, this week Boak and Bailey investigated the resurgence of Bass on cask in English pubs this week and found hope in the new enthusiasm:
What makes us think that it might, on balance, be good news is that it’s good to see people – and especially younger drinkers – expressing enthusiasm for cask ale. The Bristol Flyer on Gloucester Road in Bristol is one of those perfectly fine vaguely gastro, vaguely loungey pubs. The quality of the beer has been up and down over the years but recently it’s been serving excellent Bass. Jess often ends up there for one social event or another and on a recent visit was amazed when the hip young barperson said, with full emotion, “Oh, great choice, I love Bass, I drink it all the time! And it’s been flying out since we started selling it.” At The Crown we’ve similarly seen groups of hipsterish young men ordering rounds of Bass, getting their Bass club cards stamped, and generally embracing their identity as Bass Guys.
Bass Masters would be my choice of terms… had others not moved in on the opportunity. And if you asked how big Guinness is in the US these days… would this be the sort of response you’d have expected, as reported by BMI?
Import lagers are nearly 97% of all imported beer in US scans, per NIQ xAOC + Liquor + Conv data for 52 wks thru Mar 7, Bump Williams Consulting’s Dan Wandel found in latest data deep dive, following up on his past analysis of American lagers. Guinness stouts and Belgian ales make up most of the rest, growing nicely these days.
I wonder if 2026 Guinness regrets the Baltimore closure in 2023. As you ponder that, here are some notes:
Note #1: do you have a third condiment?
Note #2: is using the word “founder’ just cringy or worse?
Note #3: don’t forget to have fun.
Note #4: are you still hunting the next great beer?
Are you back? Good. Franz D. Hofer has been attracting attention with his wanderings out and about and then his writings all about it at A Tempest in a Tankard – but now he has joined the collective with his first piece at Pellicle, a study of things Zoiglly… Zoiglich?… Zoigl-riffic!
Tucked away in the dense woodland of northeastern Bavaria, the Oberpfalz is the cradle of Zoigl culture. Zoigl is more than a kind of beer. It’s an ethos, a resolute defence of a slower way of life in the face of our contemporary desire for on-demand pleasures. Zoigl begins life in the communal brewhouse, a holdover from the late Middle Ages. More than seventy towns in the Oberpfalz presided over communal brewhouses in the 19th century. Today, only five remain: Windischeschenbach, Neuhaus, Falkenberg, Mitterteich, and Eslarn. Residents in possession of historical brewing rights take turns from week to week brewing beer that they’ll ferment in their cellars and serve for a few days every month in their Zoiglstuben. You’ll know the beer’s ready when they hang a six-pointed Zoigl star from the façade.
Carry on with the medieval history, according to The Times and some eggheads, turns out that Pinot Noir is effectively a clone of itself going back to the 1400s:
Scientific proof has now been found that pinot noir grapes, used to make red Burgundies in France, have survived unchanged at least since the Middle Ages. A 600-year-old grape seed found in the latrine of a medieval hospital in Valenciennes, northern France, has been identified as genetically identical to modern pinot noir through DNA analysis, according to a study… By taking cuttings rather than growing from seed, winemakers can produce a new plant that is genetically identical to the mother vine. For the study, the researchers sequenced the genomes of 54 grape seeds dating from about 2,000 BC to the Middle Ages. The oldest seeds were from wild vines in southern France. Domesticated vines appeared in the region much later, between 625 and 500 BC, when Greek colonists introduced viticulture in France.
On a more serious and immediate note, if you want an easy measurement of the effect of the third Gulf War in my adulthood, Jessica Mason for DB has surveyed the consequences on India’s beer trade:
In a recent report via Reuters, the Brewers Association of India openly revealed that glass bottle prices have risen by around 20%. Added to this, packaging such as beer cartons have doubled while labels and tape have also become price affected. Gas shortages are now also forcing a raft of glass bottle makers to slow or stop their operations. Plus, aluminium can suppliers are also signalling that there will possibly be imminent reductions in the lead up to summer… “Beer businesses are particularly vulnerable when oil and gas prices rise because the impact is felt at several different points in the chain,” Molly Monks, insolvency expert at Parker Walsh, recently told db.
Hmm. You know… I have this creeping feeling that we are at March 5, 2020 unaware of the full impact of what is about to hit. With that cheery note, finally, as heavily hinted, I have joined the idle undead. I hope to be not quite as idle long term but these days my pj bottoms are finding new life in the am to pm zone. Can’t rake lawn thatch every day. So…. what to do… while way the hours pressing the fish doorbell? Or instead of that maybe this, drawn from an anecdote about Japanese writer Haruki Murakami:
…long before he became a famous writer, he ran a jazz café in Tokyo, called Peter Cat. People would come in, quietly drink an espresso or sip a single malt and listen to Miles Davis and Charles Mingus LPs on a great sound system. If anyone talked too loudly, or maybe at all, the other customers shot disapproving glares. The point wasn’t to yak or troll for a companion; it was to just sit there and listen attentively without distraction. Bars like that, known as jazz kissa, were popular back in the 1970s when Peter Cat was at the height of its fame. Now, according to National Geographic, they’re spreading to cities around the world…
I like the sound of that sorta place… but what about this place? As part of my inward thoughts, I reached out to B+B on what I might do with this space and these blistered bloody digits of mine. They shared a number of ideas via email and these two particularly struck me:
We also remembered the work you were doing around pre-1800 beer styles and brewing, which does feel overlooked. All those Derby Ales and Pimlico Ales and Dorchester Ales and the like. There’s such a strong pull towards writing about Victorians and later that this period — with sources that are harder to find an interpret — feels overlooked. We also tend to pounce on any work anyone does with meaningful analysis of data and stats. So much beer writing is about feelings and experience but numbers often reveal deep truths.
Both have the common theme of avoiding the easier path. My challenge with the first (like the 1600s Lambeth Ale or 1700s Dorchester posts) is it feels like the rise of the internet oligarchs has made easy (and free) access to reasonable organized data bases more difficult than ten years ago. I will have to investigate. The second? It’s the math. I always thought that when I was aggregating any sort of numbers and seeing what I could squeeze out of them, well, my grade 12 math teacher was standing nearby reminding me of my couragous 53 as a final exam mark. So whenever I ran some sort of beery data or another through Excel sheets I usually received “ERROR! ERROR!! ERROR!!!” responses. So… any requests? Perhaps “Shut ‘er down, Al!”? or “Take up knitting, you fool!!!” Who knows. Comments greatly appreciated.
Well, that was that. The week that was. A bit of a hard week on the nerves. Until the day I got to sleep in. That was good. We see how the next week goes. In the meantime, please check out Boak and Bailey who are posting every Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And look out for more of Stan’s new “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, as noted, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword seems to be on pause since November but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. See you next week!
*No relation.
